Live Conference Blogging – Nothing short of running a Marathon!!

Last month NASSCOM, a global trade body with over 1200 members companies, organized a conference, EMERGEOUT Conclave 2008, focusing on challenges faced by emerging companies in India. EMEREOUT Conclave 2008 was an extensively packed conference with variety of parallel sessions and presents more than 50 eminent speakers in a single day event!

OMLogic was the live blogging partner for this event. Internally, we created a team of 3 people to carry out this job. I was one of the members in this team. This is the first time I have a hands on experience of live blogging. I enjoyed it thoroughly and and it was really a great learning for all of us. Let me share some of my thoughts about live blogging.

I started by reading articles on live blogging. The purpose of this post is not to provide another set of guidelines. I think there are lots of good article already available on the web. One thing that I found common across all of the articles is that the key to successful live blogging is “Preparation”. Preparation includes:

• Reading the profiles of the speakers thoroughly
• Having a list of all the possible links, that you might need while writing a post, handy before the conference
• Creating a brief abstract of all the sessions before the conference
• Ensuring that the logistics including things like net connection, battery etc., are taken care of

At the same time no matter what preparation you have done, when the rubber meets the road, the world is entirely different. As per my experience, the key aspects required for successful live blogging are:

• Focus
• Concentration and
• Persistence

If somebody asks you to attend a conference and make sure that you get each and every aspect of all the sessions, it will take a good amount of focus, concentration and persistence on your part. Right! But what if in the same time you also need to write down your learnings in such a way that people who are not attending the conference can get the experience of conference by reading your posts. That’s what Live Blogging is.

In case you are interested in discussing anything more about live blogging, just pass a comment and we will discuss it further.